In Benito Pérez Galdós's La corte de Carlos IV (1873), Gabriel, the witty narrator, elaborates on the intellectual and moral superiority of Inés, his fourteen-year-old love interest, the daughter of a widow with whom she shares a home and a profession as a dressmaker. Having enumerated the many ways in which Inés never fails to surprise him with her unique intelligence and grasp of reality, the enamored youth foresees probable mockery and beats his audience to the punch: “¡Y era una modista; una modistilla! Reíd si os place” [“And she was a seamstress; an apprentice! Laugh if you like”] (15). In La corte, Inés serves as the literary piece's grounding compass regarding material aspirations and false superiorities associated with Madrid's upper-class society in the nineteenth century. The reader learns that Inés not only discourages Gabriel from climbing the social ladder, but is herself the biological daughter of the Condesa and has opted to maintain her working status as a lowly seamstress instead of weaving her way into her mother's wealth.

This Realist novella, in typical Galdósean fashion, allows readers to explore each layer of the capital's daily life while echoing nineteenth-century Spain's opinions on everything from plays to professions, such as that of a seamstress. As we explored in the introduction, dressmakers in Spanish literature, especially in the Realist tradition of the nineteenth century, mirrors those in English literature: novels, plays and short stories are populated with lower-middle-class female protagonists faced with the necessity of doing what was considered honorable work and thus bound to negotiate the moral tightrope walk of working in the public sphere. The gender confining message of the day warned that one moral slip up and one could fall into more seedy professions such as prostitution. Breaking with these gendered preoccupations, María Dueñas's bestseller, El tiempo entre costuras (2009), brings this timely profession into the spotlight once again as she celebrates the creative flair of the seamstress while stitching another layer of facing into the plot: that of femme fatale spy. This chapter explores the profession of dressmaker as one that facilitates entry into otherwise closed socioeconomic spaces, while elaborating the political space of the sewing workshop.